I do try to limit my snark these days, but I have to wonder if this is going to be worth a half-hour out of my week just to see new material from Ally Hannigan.
Not that we her die-hard sycophantic fans aren't happy to see she's getting work, and all. Nor to suggest that the sitcom is a format without potential for a kind of Art. But one gets the very strong impression that, having seen the incredible things she's capable of, watching her in this is going to be something like listening to Adrian Belew play a coffee jingle.
August 26, 2005
August 22, 2005
August 07, 2005
Validation?
One does try to leaven optimism with caution, but I'm all aflutter with the possibility that this may be what we've all been waiting for - an Alan Moore-inspired movie that doesn't suck.
August 03, 2005
A Penitent Man...
Back from Swampstock XII two days ago, and back to work today, alas. No vacation is ever sufficient.
And the winner of the "Commission-a-Story" auction item is (drumroll) Niels "Kraut Bastard" von Deuten, who walked with it for the bargain price of $5 (and also snagged the missus' Willie Warmer to boot, and let us make no further connexions there). I assume I'll be getting the details on what I'll be working on sometime after he's finished the moving-in process in the next week or so. I'll post updates here when that happens.
In the meantime, I have songs to write.
And the winner of the "Commission-a-Story" auction item is (drumroll) Niels "Kraut Bastard" von Deuten, who walked with it for the bargain price of $5 (and also snagged the missus' Willie Warmer to boot, and let us make no further connexions there). I assume I'll be getting the details on what I'll be working on sometime after he's finished the moving-in process in the next week or so. I'll post updates here when that happens.
In the meantime, I have songs to write.
July 26, 2005
Follow Me Down to the Valley Below
Thanks to all who sent their regards during this latest Dark Night of the Soul. I have been making a long slow recovery over the past week, and getting the love and support of my friends-and-relations has made a difference. I think one of these days soon it will be time for me to talk at length here about my lifelong Death Cage Grudge Match with depression, and share some of my thoughts on living with an incurable emotional disorder; but it is not this day, as King Elessar says.
Of course, my mood is helped considerably with the imminent onset of Swampstock XII, for which we depart tomorrow night, and it's hard indeed to work up much gloominess when you're preparing to fill the station wagon with beer and lesbians so you can spend three days getting 'faced in the woods. To those of you who aren't able to make it this year: You will be missed and in our hearts, at least until the second or third round of Fuck-Me Punch kicks in. To those of you who still haven't done one of these after twelve years (yeah, I'm lookin' at you, Arizona), let this serve as yet another reminder of what you've been missing out on all this time.
Being poorer than normal this year, I wasn't able to put together my first choice for a silent auction item (a follow-up to last year's handbound book), so I'm seeing this as a sign I need to take the next twelve months and really do it right for SS XIII. This year, though, I'm doing something a little different. The item I'll be auctioning off this weekend will be the following:
The rules are as follows:
We'll see how that goes. I'll announce the winner here when I return.
And, with that, I'm off to pack. Obviously, I'll be dropping off the map for a couple of days as of tomorrow night, so attempts to reach me via the normal means will meet with little success. (I'll probably be more than usually susceptible to astral projections, though, so that's worth a shot if you're desperate.)
See you back here in August.
Of course, my mood is helped considerably with the imminent onset of Swampstock XII, for which we depart tomorrow night, and it's hard indeed to work up much gloominess when you're preparing to fill the station wagon with beer and lesbians so you can spend three days getting 'faced in the woods. To those of you who aren't able to make it this year: You will be missed and in our hearts, at least until the second or third round of Fuck-Me Punch kicks in. To those of you who still haven't done one of these after twelve years (yeah, I'm lookin' at you, Arizona), let this serve as yet another reminder of what you've been missing out on all this time.
Being poorer than normal this year, I wasn't able to put together my first choice for a silent auction item (a follow-up to last year's handbound book), so I'm seeing this as a sign I need to take the next twelve months and really do it right for SS XIII. This year, though, I'm doing something a little different. The item I'll be auctioning off this weekend will be the following:
Commission a Story!
The winner of this auction item will have the unique opportunity to commission a fantasy short story by Dan Layman-Kennedy. You can be responsible for the birth of a work of Art!
The winner of this auction item will have the unique opportunity to commission a fantasy short story by Dan Layman-Kennedy. You can be responsible for the birth of a work of Art!
The rules are as follows:
1. The winner may select three (3) elements to be included in the story, keeping in mind that I’ll work them in however I best see fit. I promise to make these elements central, or at least important, to the story, meaning I won’t cheat and use them as wallpaper while I write about something else.
2. I reserve the right to reject elements that I find tasteless, politically offensive, or too silly to be workable. If I do find it necessary to reject an idea, you’ll have the opportunity to select an alternate. (Choosing wisely the first time, however, is highly recommended.)
3. The winner, on the other hand, receives no such guarantee regarding their own sensibilities. Keep in mind that the author is a feminist pagan bisexual with anarchist sympathies and a taste for the grotesque. Therefore, caveat emptor.
4. The elements to be included must be settled on, and agreed to by me, no later than September 1, 2005. Earlier is better, though. (If you do need that time to decide, the best way to contact me post-Swampstock is by email: maestro23@gmail.com.)
5. I’m a genre writer. If three things you thought would be perfect in a work of gritty realism, poignant coming-of-age, or chick lit end up gracing an urban fantasy tale full of octopus monsters – don’t say you weren’t warned.
6. The winner agrees not to select elements that will obviously railroad the work into suggesting or infringing upon anyone else’s established intellectual property. (The author agrees likewise.) Stealing is wrong. Hello.
7. The finished work will be no less than 3500 words. Probably longer, since I’m prone to verbosity, but you’re guaranteed at least that much. It’s also guaranteed to be a prose story – I promise not to do a bait-and-switch and write a song or an epic poem instead.
8. The story will be completed no later than one calendar year from purchase at the auction (i.e., by July 31, 2006). Hope for sooner, but don’t count on it; the Muse, like a lover, gets temperamental when rushed.
9. The winner will receive one (1) handbound pamphlet copy of the finished work, signed by me. If you don’t know if or when you’ll see me in person in the next year, I’ll be happy to send it to you by mail. This will, however, mean not making your address impossible to track down; please plan accordingly before you bid.
10. I will, of course, retain all copyright and other authorial rights and priveleges as regards the finished work, including the right to revise, submit, sell, distribute or otherwise use as I see fit.
11. Lastly, if this item ends up going for an especially high final price at auction, I’ll throw in something extra and cool to go with the finished product. Bid large and see what happens.
We'll see how that goes. I'll announce the winner here when I return.
And, with that, I'm off to pack. Obviously, I'll be dropping off the map for a couple of days as of tomorrow night, so attempts to reach me via the normal means will meet with little success. (I'll probably be more than usually susceptible to astral projections, though, so that's worth a shot if you're desperate.)
See you back here in August.
July 18, 2005
...And I Think I'm Going Nowhere
Insomnia and a really, truly dreadful case of depression have been ganging up on me for... well, at least a week now, judging by my Roller Coaster of Sick since last Monday, but in particular for the last couple of days. I'm a bit of a wreck physically and mentally (okay, more than a bit, but whatever). I know it's mostly just bad chemicals and will pass, but, damn, I wish it'd get on with it.
I do beg your pardon, devoted readers. I try not to indulge in Poor Poor Pitiful Me here if I can help it, but I'm hoping sending a little of this awfulness out into the void will help me be rid of it, or at least some of it, sooner. Fingers crossed, anyway.
I'll let you know.
I do beg your pardon, devoted readers. I try not to indulge in Poor Poor Pitiful Me here if I can help it, but I'm hoping sending a little of this awfulness out into the void will help me be rid of it, or at least some of it, sooner. Fingers crossed, anyway.
I'll let you know.
July 09, 2005
Dammit, Jesus, Quit Jogging My Arm
Via vassilissa, on the latest Open Thread on Making Light: "With You Always," a series of utterly sincere and unintentionally funny drawings of Jesus Christ backseat-driving at assorted professions.
They defy description, so go see for yourself. I particularly like the shot of the Savior of Mankind apparently offering up a small child to a clown, and the "Just get us to Reno and everything will be okay" scenario with the truck driver on page two.
UPDATE, slightly belated: Quoth Spyder, in comments, "It's like a game of 'add the caption'!" - and, of course, someone else thought so too. Courtesy Alex Cohen, in the same ML thread.
They defy description, so go see for yourself. I particularly like the shot of the Savior of Mankind apparently offering up a small child to a clown, and the "Just get us to Reno and everything will be okay" scenario with the truck driver on page two.
UPDATE, slightly belated: Quoth Spyder, in comments, "It's like a game of 'add the caption'!" - and, of course, someone else thought so too. Courtesy Alex Cohen, in the same ML thread.
June 27, 2005
Mmmm, Detritus
In case you haven't seen yet, there's a new batch of Bockhorst Fields Candle Scents over at Andy's blog, and a startling visual.
Any chance there's still Sackcloth & Ashes in stock?
Any chance there's still Sackcloth & Ashes in stock?
June 20, 2005
Record Time
Many of you have this news already, but it can use an official announcement: I've been working the last couple of weeks, as an Archival Assistant at Maryland State Archives doing quality control on land records. It's a good, if somewhat unexciting, job, though I must say being hired for actually having an applicable skill has been quite a bonus.
And I must say "unexciting" cuts both ways; I'm really just as glad to be doing something quiet and repetitive where I get left the hell alone for eight hours. It's been worth the early-morning hike to Annapolis, which I was pleased to discover takes not all that much longer than driving into Baltimore, at least during the dawn hours.
In less banal news, a reassembled OVO just spent the weekend - inspired not a little by the time-bending Fripp soundscapes show we attended Friday - making odd noises in Tony's attic and recording them. I look forward to hearing what shape it takes when it manifests properly, but the rough mix sounded pretty damn cool, even after we sobered up. Hooray! More of this sort of thing to come, let's hope.
And I must say "unexciting" cuts both ways; I'm really just as glad to be doing something quiet and repetitive where I get left the hell alone for eight hours. It's been worth the early-morning hike to Annapolis, which I was pleased to discover takes not all that much longer than driving into Baltimore, at least during the dawn hours.
In less banal news, a reassembled OVO just spent the weekend - inspired not a little by the time-bending Fripp soundscapes show we attended Friday - making odd noises in Tony's attic and recording them. I look forward to hearing what shape it takes when it manifests properly, but the rough mix sounded pretty damn cool, even after we sobered up. Hooray! More of this sort of thing to come, let's hope.
May 26, 2005
I've Been Here and I've Been There and I've Been In Between
Okay, so I think that's a long enough hiatus for anyone.
It's been an odd couple of months, though I won't exhaustively detail the ins and outs just yet; more fragments, perhaps, as I (promise, really) do more updates. Suffice to say that life continues to be good despite the odd stumble, and I think it's a measure of something profound or other that in a year about which I must sigh and say, "So far, not in the top five," I'm reminded how very lucky I am.
On the subject of setbacks, I was in yesterday for my last day at the job I'd done since December, which I'd been waiting since March or so for the other shoe to drop on, so no big tragedy. I will miss the nice people I worked with; the work itself, not so much, which is why I didn't make it the start of a New Career Path inna first place. No word yet from the Agency on a new assignment, but I continue to pursue promising leads. (Yes, those of you who have been following the Missus' posts of late: this means we are both, at the moment, out of work. We trust this is a fleeting development, and revel in the meantime in being able to stay up late on a school night.) Anyway, I had a good final half-week of training my replacement, imparting the weight of five months' worth of file-management wisdom in an impressively short span. And I was good, and did not once refer to her as "My young apprentice" in a spooky Ian McDiarmid voice.
I've also been attending, since March, the Tuesday night open mic at Huckleberry's, the local independent caffeine clinic, and got some good reaction out of my quirky originals before it got so popular that getting a slot on the lineup only happens on a Critical Success. ("The place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.") I've also met fellow tuneslinger and offbeat-music-fan Bob Parrott that way, who has been especially kind to me about my work (he calls "One of Those Nights" my first breakout radio hit), and was cool enough to invite me to play at his solo show a couple of weeks back. (Bass on Sublime's "What I Got," and recorder on "Ruby Tuesday." Tony Levin and Ian Anderson are not in fear for their careers.) As a result of our weekly meetups, Bob's now got me plunged headfirst into reading Tom Robbins, an experience I was long overdue for anyway, though I must now plot whether an intro to Ligotti or Pratchett is the more suitably addictive revenge.
And, as Big Tony relates, I am now the proud owner of PaPa's station wagon, something that turned out to be a bigger bag of mixed feelings than I anticipated. It's a huge potential boon for our working lives to have two cars now, but there's still something very sad about having that car in my driveway and having it not mean that my grandparents are here. In a way, it was the last bit of laying him to rest for me. Weird and a little hard. It's almost a sense of... responsibility.
Anyway, this weekend's our big Memorial Day/Hurrah, We're Unemployed party, with a nice gathering of our out-of-town circle converging on Chez L-K (and at least a dropin, hopefully, on Balticon), so I suppose I should go wash dishes or something. Which is not to say that I will, mind, just that I'm aware of duty even as I shirk it. The deep ethical implications are left as an excercise for the reader.
It's been an odd couple of months, though I won't exhaustively detail the ins and outs just yet; more fragments, perhaps, as I (promise, really) do more updates. Suffice to say that life continues to be good despite the odd stumble, and I think it's a measure of something profound or other that in a year about which I must sigh and say, "So far, not in the top five," I'm reminded how very lucky I am.
On the subject of setbacks, I was in yesterday for my last day at the job I'd done since December, which I'd been waiting since March or so for the other shoe to drop on, so no big tragedy. I will miss the nice people I worked with; the work itself, not so much, which is why I didn't make it the start of a New Career Path inna first place. No word yet from the Agency on a new assignment, but I continue to pursue promising leads. (Yes, those of you who have been following the Missus' posts of late: this means we are both, at the moment, out of work. We trust this is a fleeting development, and revel in the meantime in being able to stay up late on a school night.) Anyway, I had a good final half-week of training my replacement, imparting the weight of five months' worth of file-management wisdom in an impressively short span. And I was good, and did not once refer to her as "My young apprentice" in a spooky Ian McDiarmid voice.
I've also been attending, since March, the Tuesday night open mic at Huckleberry's, the local independent caffeine clinic, and got some good reaction out of my quirky originals before it got so popular that getting a slot on the lineup only happens on a Critical Success. ("The place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.") I've also met fellow tuneslinger and offbeat-music-fan Bob Parrott that way, who has been especially kind to me about my work (he calls "One of Those Nights" my first breakout radio hit), and was cool enough to invite me to play at his solo show a couple of weeks back. (Bass on Sublime's "What I Got," and recorder on "Ruby Tuesday." Tony Levin and Ian Anderson are not in fear for their careers.) As a result of our weekly meetups, Bob's now got me plunged headfirst into reading Tom Robbins, an experience I was long overdue for anyway, though I must now plot whether an intro to Ligotti or Pratchett is the more suitably addictive revenge.
And, as Big Tony relates, I am now the proud owner of PaPa's station wagon, something that turned out to be a bigger bag of mixed feelings than I anticipated. It's a huge potential boon for our working lives to have two cars now, but there's still something very sad about having that car in my driveway and having it not mean that my grandparents are here. In a way, it was the last bit of laying him to rest for me. Weird and a little hard. It's almost a sense of... responsibility.
Anyway, this weekend's our big Memorial Day/Hurrah, We're Unemployed party, with a nice gathering of our out-of-town circle converging on Chez L-K (and at least a dropin, hopefully, on Balticon), so I suppose I should go wash dishes or something. Which is not to say that I will, mind, just that I'm aware of duty even as I shirk it. The deep ethical implications are left as an excercise for the reader.
March 15, 2005
Cue Chumbawamba
Checking in to say I've been having a three-month epic battle with seasonal depression, aggravated by stress of various kinds, which is why I've been less than great about updates for a while. I won't say I'm okay, because it comes and goes, and it's been scarier lately than I remember it being in a long time, if ever. But I'm getting by.
Someday, I will have a job I like enough to stick around for and get benefits, and then I will have therapy and possibly medication. In the meantime, television, chocolate, and the occasional reread of Weaveworld will have to make do.
On the other hand, I'm pretty excited about this.
Someday, I will have a job I like enough to stick around for and get benefits, and then I will have therapy and possibly medication. In the meantime, television, chocolate, and the occasional reread of Weaveworld will have to make do.
On the other hand, I'm pretty excited about this.
February 23, 2005
Small, Favored
Huzzah! Spyder is 21 today! It is now perfectly legal to tempt her with pooftah fruity rum drinks, if that sort of thing's your bag.
And may I say that it's been a privelege, these last two and a half years, to have such a smart, talented, funny, all-around wicked cool person not only surface most fatefully into my life, but turn out to be so much on my wavelength that I think of her as the sister I never knew I had.
Welcome to your seat at the official Grownups' Table, mia sorella. Don't worry - you still don't have to act like one.
And may I say that it's been a privelege, these last two and a half years, to have such a smart, talented, funny, all-around wicked cool person not only surface most fatefully into my life, but turn out to be so much on my wavelength that I think of her as the sister I never knew I had.
Welcome to your seat at the official Grownups' Table, mia sorella. Don't worry - you still don't have to act like one.
February 19, 2005
I Still Ate'nt Dead
It's been a weird couple of weeks and I'm more or less well, though I'm still feeling the lingering effects of the bug I had a week ago, plus seasonal depression, but that's how it works sometimes. In any case, I haven't felt like I've had anything interesting to say for a while. This may be nobody's fault but mine.
I turned down a full-time position at my current place of employment last week, mostly because spending the next year as a file clerk was less appealing than I'd thought at first. ("I don't blame you," said the supervisor to whom I broke the news. "It's a terrible job and you're completely overqualified for it.") I'm still there as a temp, at least for a little while, but the search for satisfying employment continues, as does figuring out what the hell I want to be when I grow up. Aside from "brilliant and famous," that is.
Sadly, the creative well's bit a bit dry of late too, and the several projects I felt all fired up about in recent memory have completely failed to capture my attention. I know, I know - if I was really serious I'd be working on them anyway. Don't remind me.
And, uh, that's all I got these days. I'm sure I'll have much more interesting things to post in the near future. No, really, I promise.
I turned down a full-time position at my current place of employment last week, mostly because spending the next year as a file clerk was less appealing than I'd thought at first. ("I don't blame you," said the supervisor to whom I broke the news. "It's a terrible job and you're completely overqualified for it.") I'm still there as a temp, at least for a little while, but the search for satisfying employment continues, as does figuring out what the hell I want to be when I grow up. Aside from "brilliant and famous," that is.
Sadly, the creative well's bit a bit dry of late too, and the several projects I felt all fired up about in recent memory have completely failed to capture my attention. I know, I know - if I was really serious I'd be working on them anyway. Don't remind me.
And, uh, that's all I got these days. I'm sure I'll have much more interesting things to post in the near future. No, really, I promise.
January 20, 2005
Fire to Endure
Well, it's been three weeks now since my grandfather departed the world, and since I last wrote here; I think twenty-one days is probably sufficient time to gather myself and share a little.
It's been hard. The nature of loss is that it finds odd moments to remind you, when you've gotten around to thinking you're okay and acting like you're living a normal life again. But I'm mostly okay these days. I miss him terribly, which is the selfishness of the living for you. He was not happy in his last months (at least), enduring the dual onslaughts of his body's betrayals and living in a nursing home; he was ready to go. I'm glad he's not suffering any more. And I think that, hey, fourscore and one is a pretty good run of it, all told. (And Death, in her top-hat, smiles and says, "You got what everyone gets. You got a lifetime.") Nonetheless, selfishly, irrationally, I wish I'd had more time just knowing he was around. The part of me that kept up a silly hope that he'd find some spark of the person he'd been ten years ago is frustrated that now he'll never have the chance.
Anyway.
His ashes have been interred in one of his own pots, which is as grand and fitting as can be hoped for. I had the honor of bringing him home one last time, two weeks ago Saturday, after the memorial service in Allentown. It was also my great privelege to deliver his eulogy, which ran as follows:
"Thank you all for coming.
"First off, I must beg your indulgence. I know that many of you knew my grandfather as Ray or Raymond or possibly Mr. Gallucci. None of those names feel right to me. All my life, to me he's been PaPa - my brother's mispronunciation of 'Grandpa' when he was just learning to talk. It's stuck these last forty years, and if that's the name that first comes to me to call him, bear with me.
"(I also apologize if I'm echoing other things said here by family and friends. We shared, obviously, many of the same experiences, and didn't bother to make sure we weren't repeating each other. Today of all days, anything worth saying about him is worth saying more than once.)
"I have the honor of delivering this eulogy this in part because, as you might have noticed, there are no services being given by clergy today. I'm afraid PaPa's sympathies for the religious impulse were somewhat limited. (That is, believe me, putting it mildly.) He was, all his life - even through his involvement with the Unitarian church - a skeptic and a rationalist, as zealous in his atheism as any convert to a faith. To be entirely honest, it wasn't one of his kinder qualities; he was rarely hesitant to express his lack of patience with anything he saw as nonsense. A universe full of nothing more miraculous than the dance of elements and forces, circling each other in the measureless void, was quite wondrous enough for him. I myself am largely agnostic, though a great believer in the value of beauteous and meaningful nonsense, so my own sympathies are somewhat divided. Nonetheless, I won't do him the disrespect of referring to God or heaven or souls in what follows, the truth of all of which you may decide for yourselves, and which he certainly now knows better than any of us here.
"I will, however, point out that this underlines one of the delightful paradoxes in his character - the rational atheist who spent most of his life as an artist, engaged with numinal forces that science and reason have yet to quantify. To create Art is to invoke Mystery, as the first people to paint images on a cave wall knew, and those first artists were indistinguishable from priests and magicians. My grandfather's materials were the same as those of a paleolithic shaman - earth and pigment, water and fire - and the magic he conjured out of them of a similar kind.
"And, like a shaman, he seemed to only partly live in the world the rest of us did. His eccentricities - and they were, believe me, numerous - were almost all the result of the worldly things he couldn't bother to be concerned with: appearance, possessions, frivolities. It was enough that his clothes were comfortable, that a car was a serviceable conveyance, that he had enough money to live simply on. The things that were truly important to him were abstractions: Color and form. Perfection of composition. Beauty. Language. Family. Dignity. Justice.
"Even his own creations, which never awakened the joy and awe in him they did in almost everyone else, ceased to hold his interest once they were completed. A finished pot or a mosaic was just a thing, an object. A work-in-progress was sacred; woe betide the person who upset a tray of mugs before firing, before they had the chance to become complete. But break a finished piece? 'It's just mud,' he'd say, as if unable to understand why anyone would be upset by it. In a way, he may have suffered some of the disillusionment artists are prone to once they're intimate with the messy, dirty processes of creation. Some of the magic is inevitably lost once you know how the trick's done; the pot looks different to the man who spends all day up to his elbows in the stuff of its materials.
"Which is certainly not to say he was immune to wonder. He called clay 'the poetry of the earth' (and in his hands it was), though he may have given too much credit to the medium and too little to the maker in that. He sought the same poetry elsewhere as well, in music and literature and the works of the other artists he admired. About ten years ago, he decided to reread all of Shakespeare's plays (a passion we shared, and talked about too little). He remarked to me that the thought had occurred to him, over one particularly poignant bit of verse, that he knew all the words in that sentence - why couldn't he have put them together like that? The spark of genius - Shakespeare, Mozart, Rembrandt - fascinated him, maybe in part because he felt like it eluded him.
"The rest of us knew better, of course. Look at any of his works - his pottery, his paintings, his mosaics - and his incredible gifts are apparent. Many of them are abstracts, studies in pure shape and color, but even his more representational work is infused with a vision that was uniquely and brilliantly his. Once you come to know it, there's no mistaking his art for anyone else's, though the sheer amount of it is astounding: dozens of mosaics and paintings and sculptures, probably thousands of pieces of pottery. Again and again he returned to the forms that obsessed him - circles, rectangles, branches, strata - and yet his revisitations of those themes never feel stale or tired. It was part of his particular gift to reinvent without repeating himself, and that is a thing wondrous rare. Though he never quite articulated the reasons he finally ceased creating, now many years since, it may be that he felt he'd come to the end of his explorations and wanted to stop before his interest soured.
"We can forgive him for being too close to what he did to see it as it truly was. It's hard enough for me, growing up surrounded by his work, to reconcile its genius with the man who was my grandfather, just plain PaPa with his silly charm and disheveled clothes, his uncut hair and his pungent cigars. The man who made sure his grandchildren got to go to the zoo at least once a summer, who could effortlessly eat a quart of ice cream at a sitting, who cut open his shoes with a razor because they fit better that way - this person has a hard time existing in the same space as the maker of the mosaic that hangs over my fireplace. I saw many, many of his pieces as works-in-progress, saw him bent over them for hours on end, and I still can't quite fit those two personae together in my head. But it's a credit to him as both artist and man that, in my memory at least, he occupies both roles in equal measure. And it's one of the wonders of the universe that a finished pot can be a work of sublime beauty and also be… just mud. It may do that mystery honor enough to recognize the paradox and live with both truths at once.
"There is never enough time. If the human condition has an overriding theme, that may be it. The fact that we get death as part of the bargain of living ensures that time is something that is always in insufficient supply. I wish I had more now, to tell you everything about the PaPa I knew, his quirks and his brilliance and his flaws all together. And I know that everything I can recall is just a fragment of the person he was. In the time to come, I hope to know more, from those of you who saw other fragments, other facets. One of the means by which we cope with our shortage of time is the way we spend our lives at least as much in story and memory as in the living moments; it's a tragedy of our species, but also a gift. It means that Ray Gallucci will endure in all his facets for as long as our memories of him remain, as long as there are stories of him to tell, and for as long as the works he shaped out of mud and poetry may last. Flesh, after all, is also just mud, wet earth given shape by steady turning on an implacable wheel. And when this fragile vessel breaks beyond repair, we can still take joy in the poetry that lingers afterwards.
"That is why we are here today: to take joy in what lingers after a person departs the world. The rites of the dead are not for the dead, who are past caring. Our rites are for us, to say farewell, to know that we are not alone in our grief, to somehow find a way to accommodate our unbearable loss; to learn, with each other, to cope with the fact that there is now a hole in the world the size and shape of someone we dearly loved.
"His body is ash now, unmade by the same fire by which he turned clay into Art; there's a poetry, too, in that completion, a circle made whole. It's a dignified end, and dignity was something he treasured, one of the things he kept for himself until the very last. It's a comfort to me to think of him released into the Universe like that, his energies returned into Creation: no better than earth, but also no less than a sun. That was how he lived, too; may we all be inspired to do the same.
"I close my thoughts today with two pieces of verse, both of which say things I wish I had thought of first ('I know all those words') about loss and mortality and the honoring of the departed. The first is Walt Whitman, from "Song of Myself":
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
"The second is a prayer, of sorts, written by another unbeliever. This is from the Requiem Mass by Kurt Vonnegut, a fellow Unitarian and, like my grandfather, a pacifist veteran of the Second World War. It's a corrective to irrational, judgmental theology, a petition to the Universe itself to take pity on the dead and give them rest; I like to think PaPa might have approved.
Chrone, eleison.
Stoechia, eleisate.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Munde,
Neve lux somnum pertubet eorum.
"Time, have mercy upon us;
Elements, have mercy upon us;
Rest eternal grant them, O Cosmos,
And let not light disturb their sleep.
"Thank you for listening."
So life, inexorably and absurdly, goes on. I like my new job, even if it's a bit of a demotion and not quite where I saw myself at this point in my life; so it goes. We've had our first snow of the winter this week, with more on the way, and Baltimore is lovely with white. I'm going to be thirty-one on Tuesday. I hope to be able to write again soon, an impulse I haven't felt able to tap into for a little while now.
Mostly I'm just getting through the days. There are worse fates.
Thanks, everyone, for your support and love these last weeks. It's meant the world and helped more than you know. And thanks, too, for your patience while I dropped off the earth for a while. I promise I'll be in touch properly and more often in the time to come.
It's been hard. The nature of loss is that it finds odd moments to remind you, when you've gotten around to thinking you're okay and acting like you're living a normal life again. But I'm mostly okay these days. I miss him terribly, which is the selfishness of the living for you. He was not happy in his last months (at least), enduring the dual onslaughts of his body's betrayals and living in a nursing home; he was ready to go. I'm glad he's not suffering any more. And I think that, hey, fourscore and one is a pretty good run of it, all told. (And Death, in her top-hat, smiles and says, "You got what everyone gets. You got a lifetime.") Nonetheless, selfishly, irrationally, I wish I'd had more time just knowing he was around. The part of me that kept up a silly hope that he'd find some spark of the person he'd been ten years ago is frustrated that now he'll never have the chance.
Anyway.
His ashes have been interred in one of his own pots, which is as grand and fitting as can be hoped for. I had the honor of bringing him home one last time, two weeks ago Saturday, after the memorial service in Allentown. It was also my great privelege to deliver his eulogy, which ran as follows:
"Thank you all for coming.
"First off, I must beg your indulgence. I know that many of you knew my grandfather as Ray or Raymond or possibly Mr. Gallucci. None of those names feel right to me. All my life, to me he's been PaPa - my brother's mispronunciation of 'Grandpa' when he was just learning to talk. It's stuck these last forty years, and if that's the name that first comes to me to call him, bear with me.
"(I also apologize if I'm echoing other things said here by family and friends. We shared, obviously, many of the same experiences, and didn't bother to make sure we weren't repeating each other. Today of all days, anything worth saying about him is worth saying more than once.)
"I have the honor of delivering this eulogy this in part because, as you might have noticed, there are no services being given by clergy today. I'm afraid PaPa's sympathies for the religious impulse were somewhat limited. (That is, believe me, putting it mildly.) He was, all his life - even through his involvement with the Unitarian church - a skeptic and a rationalist, as zealous in his atheism as any convert to a faith. To be entirely honest, it wasn't one of his kinder qualities; he was rarely hesitant to express his lack of patience with anything he saw as nonsense. A universe full of nothing more miraculous than the dance of elements and forces, circling each other in the measureless void, was quite wondrous enough for him. I myself am largely agnostic, though a great believer in the value of beauteous and meaningful nonsense, so my own sympathies are somewhat divided. Nonetheless, I won't do him the disrespect of referring to God or heaven or souls in what follows, the truth of all of which you may decide for yourselves, and which he certainly now knows better than any of us here.
"I will, however, point out that this underlines one of the delightful paradoxes in his character - the rational atheist who spent most of his life as an artist, engaged with numinal forces that science and reason have yet to quantify. To create Art is to invoke Mystery, as the first people to paint images on a cave wall knew, and those first artists were indistinguishable from priests and magicians. My grandfather's materials were the same as those of a paleolithic shaman - earth and pigment, water and fire - and the magic he conjured out of them of a similar kind.
"And, like a shaman, he seemed to only partly live in the world the rest of us did. His eccentricities - and they were, believe me, numerous - were almost all the result of the worldly things he couldn't bother to be concerned with: appearance, possessions, frivolities. It was enough that his clothes were comfortable, that a car was a serviceable conveyance, that he had enough money to live simply on. The things that were truly important to him were abstractions: Color and form. Perfection of composition. Beauty. Language. Family. Dignity. Justice.
"Even his own creations, which never awakened the joy and awe in him they did in almost everyone else, ceased to hold his interest once they were completed. A finished pot or a mosaic was just a thing, an object. A work-in-progress was sacred; woe betide the person who upset a tray of mugs before firing, before they had the chance to become complete. But break a finished piece? 'It's just mud,' he'd say, as if unable to understand why anyone would be upset by it. In a way, he may have suffered some of the disillusionment artists are prone to once they're intimate with the messy, dirty processes of creation. Some of the magic is inevitably lost once you know how the trick's done; the pot looks different to the man who spends all day up to his elbows in the stuff of its materials.
"Which is certainly not to say he was immune to wonder. He called clay 'the poetry of the earth' (and in his hands it was), though he may have given too much credit to the medium and too little to the maker in that. He sought the same poetry elsewhere as well, in music and literature and the works of the other artists he admired. About ten years ago, he decided to reread all of Shakespeare's plays (a passion we shared, and talked about too little). He remarked to me that the thought had occurred to him, over one particularly poignant bit of verse, that he knew all the words in that sentence - why couldn't he have put them together like that? The spark of genius - Shakespeare, Mozart, Rembrandt - fascinated him, maybe in part because he felt like it eluded him.
"The rest of us knew better, of course. Look at any of his works - his pottery, his paintings, his mosaics - and his incredible gifts are apparent. Many of them are abstracts, studies in pure shape and color, but even his more representational work is infused with a vision that was uniquely and brilliantly his. Once you come to know it, there's no mistaking his art for anyone else's, though the sheer amount of it is astounding: dozens of mosaics and paintings and sculptures, probably thousands of pieces of pottery. Again and again he returned to the forms that obsessed him - circles, rectangles, branches, strata - and yet his revisitations of those themes never feel stale or tired. It was part of his particular gift to reinvent without repeating himself, and that is a thing wondrous rare. Though he never quite articulated the reasons he finally ceased creating, now many years since, it may be that he felt he'd come to the end of his explorations and wanted to stop before his interest soured.
"We can forgive him for being too close to what he did to see it as it truly was. It's hard enough for me, growing up surrounded by his work, to reconcile its genius with the man who was my grandfather, just plain PaPa with his silly charm and disheveled clothes, his uncut hair and his pungent cigars. The man who made sure his grandchildren got to go to the zoo at least once a summer, who could effortlessly eat a quart of ice cream at a sitting, who cut open his shoes with a razor because they fit better that way - this person has a hard time existing in the same space as the maker of the mosaic that hangs over my fireplace. I saw many, many of his pieces as works-in-progress, saw him bent over them for hours on end, and I still can't quite fit those two personae together in my head. But it's a credit to him as both artist and man that, in my memory at least, he occupies both roles in equal measure. And it's one of the wonders of the universe that a finished pot can be a work of sublime beauty and also be… just mud. It may do that mystery honor enough to recognize the paradox and live with both truths at once.
"There is never enough time. If the human condition has an overriding theme, that may be it. The fact that we get death as part of the bargain of living ensures that time is something that is always in insufficient supply. I wish I had more now, to tell you everything about the PaPa I knew, his quirks and his brilliance and his flaws all together. And I know that everything I can recall is just a fragment of the person he was. In the time to come, I hope to know more, from those of you who saw other fragments, other facets. One of the means by which we cope with our shortage of time is the way we spend our lives at least as much in story and memory as in the living moments; it's a tragedy of our species, but also a gift. It means that Ray Gallucci will endure in all his facets for as long as our memories of him remain, as long as there are stories of him to tell, and for as long as the works he shaped out of mud and poetry may last. Flesh, after all, is also just mud, wet earth given shape by steady turning on an implacable wheel. And when this fragile vessel breaks beyond repair, we can still take joy in the poetry that lingers afterwards.
"That is why we are here today: to take joy in what lingers after a person departs the world. The rites of the dead are not for the dead, who are past caring. Our rites are for us, to say farewell, to know that we are not alone in our grief, to somehow find a way to accommodate our unbearable loss; to learn, with each other, to cope with the fact that there is now a hole in the world the size and shape of someone we dearly loved.
"His body is ash now, unmade by the same fire by which he turned clay into Art; there's a poetry, too, in that completion, a circle made whole. It's a dignified end, and dignity was something he treasured, one of the things he kept for himself until the very last. It's a comfort to me to think of him released into the Universe like that, his energies returned into Creation: no better than earth, but also no less than a sun. That was how he lived, too; may we all be inspired to do the same.
"I close my thoughts today with two pieces of verse, both of which say things I wish I had thought of first ('I know all those words') about loss and mortality and the honoring of the departed. The first is Walt Whitman, from "Song of Myself":
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
"The second is a prayer, of sorts, written by another unbeliever. This is from the Requiem Mass by Kurt Vonnegut, a fellow Unitarian and, like my grandfather, a pacifist veteran of the Second World War. It's a corrective to irrational, judgmental theology, a petition to the Universe itself to take pity on the dead and give them rest; I like to think PaPa might have approved.
Chrone, eleison.
Stoechia, eleisate.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Munde,
Neve lux somnum pertubet eorum.
"Time, have mercy upon us;
Elements, have mercy upon us;
Rest eternal grant them, O Cosmos,
And let not light disturb their sleep.
"Thank you for listening."
So life, inexorably and absurdly, goes on. I like my new job, even if it's a bit of a demotion and not quite where I saw myself at this point in my life; so it goes. We've had our first snow of the winter this week, with more on the way, and Baltimore is lovely with white. I'm going to be thirty-one on Tuesday. I hope to be able to write again soon, an impulse I haven't felt able to tap into for a little while now.
Mostly I'm just getting through the days. There are worse fates.
Thanks, everyone, for your support and love these last weeks. It's meant the world and helped more than you know. And thanks, too, for your patience while I dropped off the earth for a while. I promise I'll be in touch properly and more often in the time to come.
December 30, 2004
Ochón
Not entirely unexpectedly, my grandfather died this morning.
More later, when I and the rest of the family have had time to adjust and get our heads together. Meanwhile, my grateful thanks to those of you who have already called with your good wishes, and my love to you all.
Have pity on the dead
Pray for the dead
Sleep has his house
Sleep has his house
Overwhelm me
Overwhelm me
Forever
Forever
Sleep has his house
Sleep has his house
More later, when I and the rest of the family have had time to adjust and get our heads together. Meanwhile, my grateful thanks to those of you who have already called with your good wishes, and my love to you all.
Have pity on the dead
Pray for the dead
Sleep has his house
Sleep has his house
Overwhelm me
Overwhelm me
Forever
Forever
Sleep has his house
Sleep has his house
December 23, 2004
Hollyday Road
Quickly, before I drop off the map for a couple of days:
New job good. Still very much in terra incognita and trying to learn the language, but it's good. More on this when I've had some time to absorb.
Haven't had much chance to keep up with everyone this week, so if you've tried to get my attention somehow, it's likely been elsewhere. I'll try and get my act together after the weekend.
Meantime, a most joyous, merry and happy holiday to all. May you be touched by light, whether of the Son of Man, the Sun Unconquered, or just cheer and good company. May the Fat Man bring you a pile of goodies. And may you eat too much, drink too much, and stay up too late doing it; it is, after all, the season of Misrule.
Pax vobiscum and much love to you all.
New job good. Still very much in terra incognita and trying to learn the language, but it's good. More on this when I've had some time to absorb.
Haven't had much chance to keep up with everyone this week, so if you've tried to get my attention somehow, it's likely been elsewhere. I'll try and get my act together after the weekend.
Meantime, a most joyous, merry and happy holiday to all. May you be touched by light, whether of the Son of Man, the Sun Unconquered, or just cheer and good company. May the Fat Man bring you a pile of goodies. And may you eat too much, drink too much, and stay up too late doing it; it is, after all, the season of Misrule.
Pax vobiscum and much love to you all.
December 16, 2004
White Ships Sail
I post this from amid the weird chaos of my last day at GWU. Monday I start my new gig as a temp at Johns Hopkins.
This place had its ups and downs, but it was a good job, and I'll certainly miss a lot of things about it. In any case, this is four years of my life I'm closing the door on - hopefully for better things, and most certainly for things closer to home.
Everything ends.
Zai jian, GW. It's been fun. May the next guy love that scanner as much as I did.
This place had its ups and downs, but it was a good job, and I'll certainly miss a lot of things about it. In any case, this is four years of my life I'm closing the door on - hopefully for better things, and most certainly for things closer to home.
Everything ends.
Zai jian, GW. It's been fun. May the next guy love that scanner as much as I did.
December 07, 2004
I Ate'nt Dead
...though between one thing and another the Great Gray Beast November certainly did a job of roughing me up.
So I got my 50k in well under the wire, and I'd be more pleased with myself scoring three for three if I wasn't so dreadfully dissatisfied with the shape of this one. It's got good moments, and moments of wreckage, and some seriously deficient through-lines, and at least one turn of phrase that caused my wife, glancing it on a random page, to taunt me with a noted lack of mercy for the purpleness of the prose. All of which adds up to convincing me that the thing is not fit for human eyes. So no beta-reads until it's done and gone over at least once.
Maija, on the other hand, gets a big old laurel wreath and a hearty Huzzah! for finishing this year - her first, if I'm not mistaken. Applause and congratulations and the jingling of bells.
Meanwhile, I'm looking at a little over a week at the old job before I'm off to the temp mines for a while. This is very weird. Not that I haven't done it before, but it's giving me a kind of lost-at-sea feeling which is not exactly what I'd have chosen for my holiday mood. Meh.
Otherwise, not much to report. My conviction that I have anything interesting to say about, well, anything is in wane at the moment, so go amuse yourself with the sidebar links and try to keep out of trouble.
So I got my 50k in well under the wire, and I'd be more pleased with myself scoring three for three if I wasn't so dreadfully dissatisfied with the shape of this one. It's got good moments, and moments of wreckage, and some seriously deficient through-lines, and at least one turn of phrase that caused my wife, glancing it on a random page, to taunt me with a noted lack of mercy for the purpleness of the prose. All of which adds up to convincing me that the thing is not fit for human eyes. So no beta-reads until it's done and gone over at least once.
Maija, on the other hand, gets a big old laurel wreath and a hearty Huzzah! for finishing this year - her first, if I'm not mistaken. Applause and congratulations and the jingling of bells.
Meanwhile, I'm looking at a little over a week at the old job before I'm off to the temp mines for a while. This is very weird. Not that I haven't done it before, but it's giving me a kind of lost-at-sea feeling which is not exactly what I'd have chosen for my holiday mood. Meh.
Otherwise, not much to report. My conviction that I have anything interesting to say about, well, anything is in wane at the moment, so go amuse yourself with the sidebar links and try to keep out of trouble.
November 15, 2004
...Sits In Western Parts
John Balance, one of the founding members of Coil and a sometime contributor to Current 93, died over the weekend.
Thanks to Andy for sending me the story. As he said, "The world certainly doesn't need any fewer interesting musicians."
"Hell is paved, despite the Balance, with tedium and loss":
(Yet the stars and the moon and the sun and the comets and the little birds and the little lights and the little animals that sing to God God bless the little animals and the little animals that scream to God please O Lord bless the little animals that weep and weep and weep they are approaching the Greatbluegate of Death itself oh Lord hear me when I shout and shout and shout my heart is almost empty)
...I fall to my knees and weep. And goodbye to You all.
Update: David Tibet pays heartbreaking tribute on the Durtro site.
There will undoubtedly be more.
Thanks to Andy for sending me the story. As he said, "The world certainly doesn't need any fewer interesting musicians."
"Hell is paved, despite the Balance, with tedium and loss":
(Yet the stars and the moon and the sun and the comets and the little birds and the little lights and the little animals that sing to God God bless the little animals and the little animals that scream to God please O Lord bless the little animals that weep and weep and weep they are approaching the Greatbluegate of Death itself oh Lord hear me when I shout and shout and shout my heart is almost empty)
...I fall to my knees and weep. And goodbye to You all.
Update: David Tibet pays heartbreaking tribute on the Durtro site.
There will undoubtedly be more.
November 10, 2004
Omnia mutantur, Neil interit
It's Neil Gaiman's birthday today. Happy 44th, dream-weaver; Murphy watch over you, and many happy returns.
I can think of no better way to mark this than to renew my overlong-expired membership to the CBLDF - which you should join, too, if you haven't already. Now more than ever, defenders of free speech are going to need all the help they can get, so get a membership, donate, buy some of their swag. They're seasoned champions in the war against fuckwittage, and we need them, and they need the support of Readers Like You. (And, dude, they have Barry Ween stuff. How goddamn cool is that?) As they used to say in the funnybooks: 'nuff said.
My own writing isn't quite going like gangbusters so far this week; I'm at an even-keeled 15,652 words, which isn't where I'd like to be but is respectable enough. NaNoFounder Chris Baty recommends a hearty breakfast, so maybe that'll make the difference tonight. In any case, a day that starts with a bacon, egg and cheese bagel (no doubt my first of many violations of Leviticus before bedtime) can only be so bad.
I can think of no better way to mark this than to renew my overlong-expired membership to the CBLDF - which you should join, too, if you haven't already. Now more than ever, defenders of free speech are going to need all the help they can get, so get a membership, donate, buy some of their swag. They're seasoned champions in the war against fuckwittage, and we need them, and they need the support of Readers Like You. (And, dude, they have Barry Ween stuff. How goddamn cool is that?) As they used to say in the funnybooks: 'nuff said.
My own writing isn't quite going like gangbusters so far this week; I'm at an even-keeled 15,652 words, which isn't where I'd like to be but is respectable enough. NaNoFounder Chris Baty recommends a hearty breakfast, so maybe that'll make the difference tonight. In any case, a day that starts with a bacon, egg and cheese bagel (no doubt my first of many violations of Leviticus before bedtime) can only be so bad.
November 07, 2004
There's a Wall of Words Around My Heart
I am, I'm pleased to report, right on schedule for Week One with a wordcount of 12,297. This is good, and gives me hope.
I'm not following my original plan of working from an outline, mostly because I kicked it off at the top a week ago and it just sort of kept going. This may yet change, of course. For now, pace and progress are both good, though I've been positively Benedictine about not rereading, so for all I know it's twenty-five single-spaced pages of complete crap. So it goes; ask me again come winter, when I'm gnashing my teeth over the rewrite.
I apologize if I haven't been up to jumping into last post's excellent political discussion, though all y'all are doing such a fine job of it that I can't bring myself to feel much guilty about it. My energies, at least for now, are largely elsewhere, and I figure if the Chimp's keeping me away from my novel then the goddamn bad guys have already won. But do carry on, and I'll try and contribute when I feel I've something constructive to add.
It's been a gorgeous autumn weekend up here in Edgewood, and it's weird as anything to think that we've had nearly a whole year in our house. Strange turns of fortune. I'm lucky as hell, and don't think for a minute I don't know it.
Now I'm going to treat myself to a shower and some pleasure reading. I'm pretty confident I've earned it. Good night, and be kind to each other. Now more than ever, it's what the world needs.
I'm not following my original plan of working from an outline, mostly because I kicked it off at the top a week ago and it just sort of kept going. This may yet change, of course. For now, pace and progress are both good, though I've been positively Benedictine about not rereading, so for all I know it's twenty-five single-spaced pages of complete crap. So it goes; ask me again come winter, when I'm gnashing my teeth over the rewrite.
I apologize if I haven't been up to jumping into last post's excellent political discussion, though all y'all are doing such a fine job of it that I can't bring myself to feel much guilty about it. My energies, at least for now, are largely elsewhere, and I figure if the Chimp's keeping me away from my novel then the goddamn bad guys have already won. But do carry on, and I'll try and contribute when I feel I've something constructive to add.
It's been a gorgeous autumn weekend up here in Edgewood, and it's weird as anything to think that we've had nearly a whole year in our house. Strange turns of fortune. I'm lucky as hell, and don't think for a minute I don't know it.
Now I'm going to treat myself to a shower and some pleasure reading. I'm pretty confident I've earned it. Good night, and be kind to each other. Now more than ever, it's what the world needs.
November 03, 2004
"Where is the horse and the rider?"
Take the day, if you must, to grieve.
Get it out of your system, because tomorrow we're getting back up.
Be angry. Be frustrated. Be furiously, fiercely,righteously pissed off, because we're going to need it. There's work to be done.
What we don't need is defeatism and hopelessness. And we don't need any fucking despair. It's a luxury we're done with, now. Remember that half of the nation stood with you last night. I'm not ready to do them the dishonor of curling up and going quietly. Are you?
And shame, shame on you if you start talking about Canada now. This is the country that needs you, more than ever. It's still ours. We're not giving it up without a hard, bitter fight. (What, you thought this was going to be easy?)
This is not a tragedy; this is a setback. The battles that were there on Monday are still there this morning. I plan to keep fighting them while I can still draw breath. If I lose - if we lose - it won't be because I lost heart when the tide of it turned against me. The one sure way our enemies can prevail is if we give up and let them.
Are you with me?
For Wrath, for Ruin--
Get it out of your system, because tomorrow we're getting back up.
Be angry. Be frustrated. Be furiously, fiercely,righteously pissed off, because we're going to need it. There's work to be done.
What we don't need is defeatism and hopelessness. And we don't need any fucking despair. It's a luxury we're done with, now. Remember that half of the nation stood with you last night. I'm not ready to do them the dishonor of curling up and going quietly. Are you?
And shame, shame on you if you start talking about Canada now. This is the country that needs you, more than ever. It's still ours. We're not giving it up without a hard, bitter fight. (What, you thought this was going to be easy?)
This is not a tragedy; this is a setback. The battles that were there on Monday are still there this morning. I plan to keep fighting them while I can still draw breath. If I lose - if we lose - it won't be because I lost heart when the tide of it turned against me. The one sure way our enemies can prevail is if we give up and let them.
Are you with me?
For Wrath, for Ruin--
November 02, 2004
Re-Defeat Wishworld
Final thoughts on why we should oust the Smirk today:
Anyanka. You trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any better than this?
Giles. Because it has to be.
Break the demonic power. Vote.
Anyanka. You trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any better than this?
Giles. Because it has to be.
Break the demonic power. Vote.
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